A lone, white couple lived on the top floor. The couple survived the fire.

Jesse Jackson, John Burris and Al Sharpton were furious!! They flew into LA and met with the fire chief, on camera. They loudly demanded to know, Why the Blacks, Black Muslims and Hispanics, All died in the fire and why only the White couple lived?

The Fire Chief said, "They were at work"

This has just got to keep on circulating… it’s too good…

This is how the right wing thinks. This is Tea Party. This is Republican conservatism. This is the heart of the modern Republican party.

Nineteen people burned to death in a house fire. None of them were white. The white people survived because they were at work.

Nineteen people burned to death.

And that’s funny. Because they weren’t white. Because their lives were different. Because they were, what, morally defective?

But the white couple? Apparently very virtuous. They were at work, of some kind.

This is virulently racist stereotyping. It’s the sort of thing that serves to confirm the beliefs of the shallow ‘thinkers’ on the right.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to concentration camps and furnaces, all run by the ‘right people’, the good people, the moral people, the people who think it funny that nineteen people burned to death in a house fire.

And it is the sort of thing that appears to be very popular on the right. The party of Boehner. Of Palin. Of Kantor. Of the Koch brothers. Of Romney. Of Limbaugh and Hannity. Of fundogelicals. The party of morality and family values.

It is now an American value that people of color burn to death in house fires. That’s a family value today.

There’s a good piece in The Guardian about racial prejudice being used by Republicans to foster racial division in South Carolina.

Naturally we have to read a well written and researched article like this in an English newspaper because the American press won’t touch it. Just like the fact that more whites get food stamps than blacks seems somehow never to get as much mention as Republican charges that blacks are sucking from the system the money and the jobs and whatever else white people might want.

Haley Barbour, currently governor of the residually racist state of Mississippi, has gone and laid some praise on the Citizen’s Council, a nasty piece of racist work founded in Mississippi in reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional.

TPM has the story in all its ugly glory, along with an enlightening historical explication of the situation, including an image of the front page of the August 1956 issue of the news rag, The Citizens’ Council, which speaks volumes of unadulterated proud white bigotry.

Barbour is now engaged in the usual Republican process of denying that he is the ugly thing that he says he is.

Read all about it and ask yourself why it is that modern Republicans seem to be the ones in such a hurry to roll the country back to a past that they think is so glorious. You know, back to the time when there was no Social Security or Medicare, when Americans were rugged, independent individuals who didn’t ever need a hand, especially when they had the Klan and the Citizen’s Councils to protect them from the consequences (usually none) of lynching subhuman niggers (a pejorative that lives on in the conscious and subconscious of modern Republicans no matter how often the media and the African-American community try to infantilize it to the ‘n-word’).

Republicans usually appeal to their history as the so-called Party of Lincoln-who-freed-the-slaves, implying that they couldn’t possibly be racist and that Haley Barbour is just a good ol’ down home boy defending his home turf.

Update: Good ol’ boy Haley walked it back. Read all about it, here and here.

Cenk Uygur on MSNBC just reminded everyone that ol’ Haley said there weren’t any problems integrating the University of Mississippi when he was there. He must have been on a different part of the campus when the riots, fires, and gunplay were going down.

Ol’ fathead Haley also claimed he had a friendly relationship with a black woman at that time and that he still loved her. She noted that he got her middle name wrong and she remembered him but didn’t have anything to do with him.

Wait for it. Listen. Hear that? That’s the sound of The Lion giggling.

From an email appeal from Democratic Representative Alan Grayson in Florida:

——————————————

My opponent, Dan Fanelli, thinks that only brown people should have to pass through security at the airports. Because all terrorists are brown people.

I’m not making this up. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself (as 150,000 others have). If you can stomach it:

Apparently, Dan Fanelli is running against me because I’m not racist.

Fanelli’s "racist madness" was reported on MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, CBS, and Talking Points Memo. You can watch the ad on Keith Olbermann’s show, which dedicated a whole segment to Fanelli.

But let’s go through some pictures together, so Dan Fanelli can see some different faces of terrorism.

Terrorists come in all colors, shapes, sizes, and even genders. But Fanelli isn’t really talking about terrorism. What Fanelli and his Republican bigot friends are saying is that American citizenship comes in two versions: white and nonwhite. That’s why they want to put through laws that would require every single person to carry proof of citizenship, or risk arrest. Because they want to degrade and put down everyone who isn’t just like them.

I have news for them. America is a nation, not a tribe.

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The Lion is a fan of Alan Grayson. He’s one of the few Democrats to call out the sickos and whackos on the right, and there are a lot of targets out there for him.

TPM has a brief retrospective of Mr. Williams’ delightful soul vomit. Get the full flavor of evil right from the man’s own lips. Or keyboard. Whatever. In a rational world society would send him to a cell in a thorazine factory where he could Tea Party for the rest of his life.

A sample of Mr. Williams’ intelligent commentary:

[R]epeat after me: Islam is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings or even desirable mammals for that matter.

‘Scuse me, I’ve gone to look for America. Not finding it lately, just finding lame sickos like Williams and Beck and Limbaugh and the ignoramuses of the Tea Party and the paranoid anti-American fools comprising the Republican Party.

Last night ophthalmologist Rand Paul of Kentucky, the newly anointed Republican candidate for Kentucky Senator, went on the Rachel Maddow show and demonstrated his new dance steps.

Ms. Maddow had a simple question for him, based on his previous comments and expressed beliefs. She wanted to know if Mr. Paul would allow private businesses to discriminate against people by refusing to serve classes of people the owners didn’t care for, for example, blacks, gays, or Latinos.

Mr. Paul refused to answer the question. Not outright, of course: that would have been too honest and too principled. Nope, this fellow, this doctor who presents himself as a principled and honest man in contrast to the evil politicians of Washington, danced around the question like a bug on a hot skillet for almost twenty minutes. He claimed he favors banning racial discrimination in government institutions and federally funded institutions, but that’s about as far as he’ll go.

He tried talking about anything else, including the second amendment and the first amendment, and he finished up by attacking Maddow for asking the question. His obfuscations and distractions are just amazing to watch. And Maddow persisted, refusing to let him off the hook the way most media people would. She’s a gem.

If you’re not yelling at the video after a couple of minutes you’re not getting the point.

While he loudly proclaims he finds racism vile, he would, if we can take his refusal to answer the central question as indicative of his true views, allow discrimination in any privately held business that serves the public. He would return the country to the era of Jim Crow and segregation, the age of water fountains, bathrooms, and lunch counters for ‘Coloreds’ and ‘Whites’.

Mr. Paul holds other views that appear to be to the far right of the far right, but his views on the matter of race mark him unequivocally as a racist who would enshrine racism in the law and politics of the United States.

And he possesses the most boringly annoying manner of speaking! Fingernails on a chalkboard, anyone? Not that that’s important, but really, his voice just cries out to have a dirty sock stuffed in his mouth.

Mr. Paul’s celebration speech Tuesday night started out with him saying his Tea Party had a message for America. He said he and his ilk were going to take America back.

Given his performance on Maddow last night one can fairly assume he meant take it back from the mulatto in the White House. (Genteel Kentucky Tea Partiers probably don’t say ‘nigger’ out loud.)

So let’s hear it for Rand Paul as he does the get-down racist boogey! Yowsah!

Last night Rachel Maddow dug into the white supremacist connections behind Arizona’s shiny new law enshrining bigotry and racism on the way to pinning identifying chili pepper logos on Latinos in that state.

The people behind the law are pretty foul examples of white Americans. Racists, eugenicists, white supremacists, and a neo-Nazi hugger (literally) state Senator.

So, yeah, Arizona is now officially a racist state. And Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, whatever she was before she signed the bill into law and made some really stupid comments, now she’s tainted forever with the filth and ignorance of white supremacy.

Score one for the white race. That’d be the race of fat old white politicians and pundits looking angry and uncomfortable when anyone dares question them and they try to sound intelligent, instead appearing like what they really, truly are: brain-dead, arrogant, ignorant slime that corrodes and destroys the structure of law and decency that holds this country together.

Yesterday, with lots of fanfare and press coverage and noisy citizens on both sides of the issue, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a draconian law that targets people with dark skin, Latino features, and dark hair.

The law says those people have to carry immigration papers and that Arizona police have to ask them to show those papers on demand.

According to the press there will be immediate court challenges. In the meantime, anyone who looks Hispanic is at risk of being accosted by cops, and anyone who looks Hispanic and is an American citizen is at risk of being accosted by cops, misidentified, and thrown in the slammer.

But Governor Brewer has a solution to the problem of racial profiling. According to the story in today’s Globe:

She said racial profiling will not be tolerated, adding, “We have to trust our law enforcement.’’

Yup. That’ll do it.

So what’s a Hispanic to do?

First thing is for Arizona Hispanics to get their act together, register to vote, and throw the fools out of office at the next election.

In the meantime, Latinos should all act guilty. Seriously. If everyone who looks Hispanic starts acting guilty, looking over their shoulder, walking the other way when they see a cop, how long can the law be viable? If everybody looks guilty to the cops, the cops will have to give it up. And the only criteria they have on which to decide who to harass is looks. So, Latinos, sidle a little, look over your shoulder, glance furtively a lot, avoid cops, pretend to be guilty of something heinous or even misdemeanorous, hang out where you know illegals hang out. Make the cops sweat.

The Lion wonders how the cops are going to feel when a Hispanic, decorated Iraq war veteran comes home with a case of PTSD, and being stopped by some donut-stuffed, macho, “Cops”-watching cop, goes off on him and gets killed by the cop, or vice-versa. The Lion suggests to Ms. Brewer and the legislators of Arizona that that’s pretty much a sure thing. Maybe they should be making those phone calls of sympathy now to the families of every Arizona veteran who looks Hispanic.

The Arizona power structure moans that the Federal government hasn’t done anything to help them deal with immigration problems, so that’s why they need to institutionalize racial profiling and codify it into law. Of course, in the next breath they’ll complain about socialist government, communists in the White House, and government interference in the rights of (white) man.

But of course the Feds do have responsibilities in the matter, but the yahoos and rednecks in suits that the states send to the Senate and the House have done their best to screw up every effort by the government to get a handle on the problem. They apparently want to treat everyone who’s not white as a subhuman, not worthy of respect or dignity, while taking a hands-off approach to the white owners and businessmen who provide jobs to illegals, along with gutter wages and ripoffs.

It’s amusing to see the fat old white men and women bitching about illegal aliens who come to America to commit crimes and take jobs and breed. It’s likely none of those complaining ever worked as hard as most of the illegals do, for as little money, under such adverse circumstances.

Setting up draconian requirements for the eleven million who are already here, demanding money they haven’t got, and back taxes on pay nobody can really account for, isn’t going to work either. A good many of them already pay taxes, just to appear legal.

They’re here. They’re working. Admit it, and admit that a good part of the reason they’re here is because the government has failed to act in a reasonable and effective way to deal with them. There’s no point in trying to punish them. Instead, consider them a resource. Set reasonable requirements: learn English, study for citizenship, pass tests. And make sure employers pay legal wages.

Beef up the border, but don’t turn it into a Berlin wall or an Israeli wall. Find another way. And don’t leave these people to die in the desert. They’re human. They want to work. They want to raise families. They want food in their bellies. They’re willing to work and work hard for their families, for their children. They’re not different from most Americans.

Except for that color thing, and that looking Hispanic thing, which is all that the Arizona legislature and governor can seem to see.